Horizon Line, Patterned, Warm and Cool Colored Landscapes

Every year I ask the kids to draw their house or family in a drawing. It can be a scary subject this day, but the way they draw and talk about  both can tell you a lot about the child and family. With that aside,  every year the children struggle drawing houses. This is understandable at such a young age, but this year I had a fifth grader struggle with a house. I thought to my self... I have to draw houses more with the children and talk about floors and different styles of homes in a simplistic form. 

We started talking about the horizon line and the fact that it separates the sky from the ground. We drew the line across the middle of the page. Above the line we drew two trees and three houses. Below we made curved lines as if they were rows in a farm field (We live in WISCONSIN). We filled the rows with patterns and textures (line designs like the bottom of our shoes). For the color the students picked from the warm and cool colors. The first color scheme they did the sky and windows. The second color scheme not used yet was applied to the trees and houses and the hill. We used the same color scheme as we uses to color in the houses and the hill details to paint the watercolor wash (one color).